Fire Your Boss
your boss asked someone to pick up his lunch on Monday, someone else to drop off his dry cleaning on Wednesday, and you to give him a lift to get his car at the service station on Friday. What did your boss get from these actions? Help with his personal chores. So you would write down that one of his needs is to have someone be his personal assistant, not just his work assistant.
    Perhaps you notice that your boss gets into a funk every Tuesday afternoon just before he has to attend the weekly meeting of department managers. You’d be safe to write down that one of the things he probably wants is to get out of going to those meetings.
    By the way, if you simply can’t figure out what your boss’s needs and wants are, study your boss’s boss. Whatever his or her personal wants, every boss needs to please the person above, just as you need to please him or her. So if you can help your boss please his or her boss, you’ll be providing a great service. Just make sure your efforts don’t come as a surprise. You don’t want to appear as if you’re going over his or her head.
Typical Needs and Wants
    The list of possible needs and wants is huge, but let me offer some general examples clients and I discovered when analyzing observations. I’ve developed six general personality types to help you spot your boss’s needs and wants. While needs and wants do tend to fall into these groupings, there are no ironclad rules about what bosses are like. You may find your boss fits none of these characterizations, or has needs or wants from two or three different types. This isn’t an exact science. Feel free to draw on all of these types, or none, and to mix and match as you’d like. I’m just trying to offer some examples to help you get started in developing your own custom profile of your boss.
    The buddy.
This is the boss who just wants to be one of the guys. He’s always asking people to go to lunch with him. Whenever groups of employees gather he wants to be a part of whatever is happening. He wants to join in outside activities and sometimes will even organize. He talks a lot about his personal life, and wants advice on personal matters. He may love to hear himself talk and not be much of a listener, so he needs an audience.
    For the past eight years Tim Kalamos has been one of the most productive insurance adjusters in the New York area. A former building contractor, he’s expert at assessing how much and what type of repairs will be necessary, and then accurately projecting the costs. Because of his experience, he’s also able to write up more reports in a week than almost anyone else at his company. Yet when he came to see me he felt his job was in danger. A new regional manager had taken over and seemed to have it in for Tim. When Tim came to me with his notes on his boss’s behavior, we found an interesting pattern. The boss, who had just been transferred to the New York area from the Texas office, was constantly asking people for tips on where to go for lunch, where to shop, what doctors his family should use. Tim and I decided the boss’s biggest need was for a buddy who could teach him about life in New York. Tim, a native New Yorker, was perfect for that role.
    The loner.
This is the boss who just wants to do her job and not be bothered with everything else. She’s miserable about attending social gatherings or meetings that don’t directly pertain to what she does. She issues directives to subordinates and wants not to be asked questions or to have to do any hand-holding. She’s wants to avoid small talk and wants new challenges to tackle so she can keep busy.
    Jon Halladay is a mechanical engineer working with a consulting firm that specializes in the aviation industry. Having been recruited to work for the firm from a major manufacturer of aircraft engines, Jon thought he’d be greeted as a welcome addition to the firm. But he soon realized the supervisor of the project he was working on was problematic.

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